Until August 11, the top floor of the
American University Museum
presents a 50-year retrospective of D.C. art between 1940 and 1989, and
it feels much like a multifarious Washington Project for the Arts
auction. On view are some muscular works by Jim Sanborn and Robin Rose,
as well as a few old standards by Martin Puryear, Sam Gilliam, and
Kenneth Noland.
But, with more than 80 artists represented in the exhibit—most by a
single piece—the show doesn't distill the working careers of the artists
involved or offer a coherent sense of identity or movement happening in
D.C. The only exception is the featured work from the late 1950s and
early '60s, when seemingly every artist in Washington was under the
spell of Abstract Expressionism and the so-called Washington Color
School. After that, District art hopped all over the map.

Of
course, this is an exhibit of some compromise, pulled together in
limited time. American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, a
consistent supporter of D.C. art, found a hole for an exhibit last year
when he learned The Washington Arts Museum was publishing Washington Art Matters,
a book on local art from 1940 to 1989. Earlier this year, the book's
authors gave Rasmussen a list of artists to include in the show, and the
museum got to work plucking the relevant art from private collections
and three area museums in under 10 weeks (the museum already owned about
a third of the work).

Washington Art Matters, written by Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey,
is, by the authors' own admission, "well intentioned." Unfortunately,
it struggles with the same hurdles the exhibit does. This summary of 50
years of Washington art, condensed into 213 pages, often reads like a
summary of a summary.

Anderson's piece is a very good read of this show, and showcases this talented critic's finely tuned and wise insights into the DMV visual arts scene... and it also manages to focus on the Pyrrhic task of trying to write a book and then put up an exhibition that tries to sum up 50 years of anything...If my first of the three planned books on DC visual artists drew so much air intake (every once in a while I still get an email from an artist being pissed off that he/she wasn't included in the first volume, and there's still one included artist who still fumes because he wasn't included on the cover - even though I had zip to do with that part), can you imagine what a book attempting to discuss 50 years of DC area art achieves in that area?I was once advised that my first volume listing 100 artists would piss off 10,000 unlisted artists... 200 or so will be somewhat tranquilized by the next two volumes, but I can only think of how many 1940-1989 DC artists feel "excluded" from this volume - that's the real Pyrrhic task for the authors (Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey), all of whom must be congratulated on the creation of this important and much needed documentation.

Anderson asks way too much of this show when he writes:

But, with more than 80 artists represented in the exhibit—most by a
single piece—the show doesn't distill the working careers of the artists
involved or offer a coherent sense of identity or movement happening in
D.C.

I'm not sure that it is possible to distill an entire career in such a setting - even retrospectives struggle to show an artist's career if that artists has had a few decades of production. I am also always puzzled why in the visual arts, we're always looking for a sense of order or as he puts it coherence. It is impossible to ask a diverse group of contemporary artists, much less an entire city or region to all collapse into a identifiable and coherent sense of identity - I challenge anyone to show me such a phenomenom in the last 150 years. In fact, the last time that this happened was probably in the 1800s, but we're still using it as a litmus test somehow.

I betcha that even in the halcyon days of the Washington Color School (I loved this part from Anderson's review: "Perhaps the most significant event that separates us from other cities is that Clement Greenberg came here, the colorful staining of canvas was declared a "school," and the recognition made the art-survey books" - the dude is so right!) there was a truckload of DMV artists who weren't staining canvasses or painting lines.

With respect to the latter, I am still astonished to see how many DMV area shows (two will open today/this weekend) include artwork by living artists who are essentially channeling the stripe painters of the 1960s and are yet being shown in 2013. I have never seen a Washington Color Schoolish type artwork in any art fair around the world in the last decade, but here in the DMV both recent graduates and older artists continue to channel Noland, Davis, etc. Somebody should write about that...

Anderson ends his review by stating:

Of course, there's no question that D.C. has contributed to 20th century
art in important ways, and nurtured significant artists, as it
continues to do. But Washington Art Matters recycles old, whiny
arguments to make that point, and the companion exhibit in the AU
Museum was afforded too little time and not enough space to give D.C.
art the exclamation point it too often seeks.

Sounds like John is challenging American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen to devote the entire Katzen to a Washington, DC show... cough, cough.

I'm going to see this show, and you have to go see it too... this is Washington, and this is visual art, and visual artists stand on the shoulders of other artists... so go and pay homage to your predecessors. Art school faculties around the region should also all take their classes to this exhibit, and I'd hope that all of our area's museum curators and directors would also take the opportunity to visit and learn about our area's visual arts footprint, but I know that this is asking too much of DMV art curators most of whom who'd rather take a cab to Dulles to fly and go see a group art show by Berlin artists in Germany than take a cab to American University to go see this show... feh!

And thank you to American University Museum Director Jack Rasmussen, whose drive and insight and skill shows and demonstrates what a museum can do to become more than white walls that show pictures and instead essentially become a key part of a city. And thank you Jean Lawlor Cohen, Sidney Lawrence, Elizabeth Tebow, and Benjamin Forgey, for this intense and important labor of love.

Finally, there's a panel discussion at the Katzen on July 20 - details here.

Washington Art Matters: The 1980s
Saturday, July 20, 3 p.m.
American University Museum
Admission is free
Art
Attack project artist Alberto Gaitán; curator-advocate Jim Mahoney; and
on-the-scene writer Lee Fleming discuss the aesthetic and political
issues of the 1980s. The panel is moderated by Sidney Lawrence, an
emerging artist at the time and the Hirshhorn's PR person until 2003,
who is one of the Washington Art Matters, Art Life in the Capital: 1940-1990's authors.